Tag: .NET Framework

Before discussing the nameof operator in C#6, I want us to consider why nameof exists at all. So, let's head back ten years to the heady days of 2005.

When version 2.0 of the .NET framework arrived, it transitioned the fledgling platform from a sketch of what might be to a fully-formed platform that could support ongoing and future desktop and web development. Since then, each release of the framework and its associated languages have added a variety of bells and whistles that simplify and enhance the way we develop. Among many of the concepts and types introduced by .NET 2.0 was System.ComponentModel.INotifyPropertyChanged, part of the enhanced data binding introduced to Windows Forms development. This interface turned out to be a workhorse and introduced many developers to a new problem; making sure the string that named a variable matched the name of an actual variable.

Now, you may well object to this claim since various versions of ArgumentException already demanded this of developers, but I think we both know that until our tooling got smarter (like FxCop and Resharper), many of us just did not fill that argument out if we could help it. After all, the stack trace would tell us where the crash happened, we could put something meaningful in the exception message, and keeping that variable name up-to-date after refactoring was a pain. With the advent of INotifyPropertyChanged the benefit of putting the variable name in a string started to outweigh the costs. Quickly, patterns emerged to try and simplify this, from dubiously performant uses of reflection to build-time code generation. As tools matured, we could get refactorings that took these strings into account and warnings that could shout at us if a variable was mentioned that didn't exist. Few of these were particularly elegant or entirely foolproof, and none were both1. In addition to ArgumentException and INotifyPropertyChanged, property names would be used for logging and debugging.

In the Name of Progress

There were calls for a new operator to accompany typeof; the new operator, infoof2 would provide the corresponding reflection information of a particular code construct (like MethodInfo or PropertyInfo), simplifying not just obtaining the name of something, but also any reflection operation involving that something. All this use and discussion of meta-information did not go unnoticed. Eric Lippert blogged about infoof and why it would be useful, why it was so difficult to implement, and indirectly foreshadowed where we would be today. However, amid the discusson, there was little action.

In 2012, .NET 4.5 brought us the CallerMemberNameAttribute type and its siblings, CallerLineNumberAttribute and CallerFilePathAttribute. These new attributes enabled developers to decorate method arguments, indicating that the appropriate piece of information was to be injected into that argument when the method was called. This fell short of an infoof operator, but it greatly simplified use of INotifyPropertyChanged (and INotifyPropertyChanging, introduced in .NET 3.5). Alas, argument exceptions, logging, debugging, and other uses of method, variable, and property names were left as they were, often leading to mismatched error messages, obscure data binding bugs, and other problems.

That changed in 2015 with the new releases of both .NET and C#, and the new nameof operator in C#6. The nameof operator is sublimely simple; in fact, its concept seems so obvious that it's a wonder it took so long to appear3. Using nameof, we can inject the names of variables, types, methods, events, and properties into all sorts of places at compile-time4, knowing that if we change the name, our refactoring tools can update all references with confidence. Not only that, but our intent is clear; we want the name of this thing to be here and not just some string that happens to look like the name of some thing. While the nameof operator does not replace CallerMemberNameAttribute, which so deftly simplified INotifyPropertyChanged5, it does simplify other scenarios like throwing ArgumentException, logging errors, and outputting debug information.

In Conclusion

When I first contemplated writing a whole blog entry dedicated to nameof, I thought it was too simple a feature to warrant such focus; now I have finished, I believe nameof to be entirely worthy of the attention. Along with the fantastic string interpolation in C#6, I believe nameof is one of the simplest and most useful additions to the C#6 language. Like many C# and .NET features we now take for granted, nameof is a beautifully simple concept that we will come to rely upon. I believe it will save us countless hours of fixing erroneous refactoring, arguing over coding style and code reviews, and head-scratching at spurious errors.

The for the last six1 releases the C# compiler has been keeping part of the .NET Framework secret from us2; exception filters. It turns out that the .NET Framework has supported exception filters since the very beginning, there was just no way to express them using C# until now.

C#6 adds the when keyword for use in try/catch blocks to specify exception filters. An exception filter is a predicate method that takes the thrown exception and returns true when the exception should be caught or false when it should not. If the filter says the exception should not be caught, the underlying system can continue to throw it.

This allows us to reduce the complexity in our code as we can put multiple catch statements with different filtering rules in the same try/catch block. This gives a switch style approach to exception handling that is supported at the lowest level, reducing the need to rethrow exceptions (or to remember the difference between throw; and throw exceptionVar;)3.

Before I continue, I must state that this is a completely contrived example for demonstrable purposes; your filters would probably act on more than just the value of a string, the two filters shown would use the same code, and the handling would involve different things in each catch4.

Now, some things to note. First, the parentheses around the when condition are mandatory; you don't need to remember this as the compiler and syntax highlighting will remind you. Second, the content of the when condition must evaluate to bool; you cannot specify a lambda expression here. I am certain most of you already assumed that, but for some reason, I felt like that should be possible. However, when is akin to if or while, so it makes sense that a lambda expression would not work.

The example above provides three different catch blocks for the exact same exception type, ArgumentException. Each filter is evaluated in the order specified, so, if CallSomething() threw an ArgumentException with ParamName set to param2, the when condition on the first catch would reject it, but the second filter would catch it and handle accordingly. A ParamName value filtered out of the first two catch blocks would fall into the last.

In conclusion

Exception filtering is a useful and simple concept that should help to make exception handling easier to write. While some kind of filtering could be achieved before using conditions and throw inside of catch blocks, this language support now means that exception handlers (the content of catch blocks) have a single responsibility and the catch statements themselves are entirely responsible for declaring what must be caught. It also means that the exception handling within the .NET framework can be entirely responsible for routing exceptions in C#-implemented applications.

Exception filters have been supported by VB.NET and .NET-supporting variants of C++ since the versions released alongside .NET Framework 1.1; now, as of C#6, they are supported by C# too.

A colleague of mine, Eric Charnesky, asked me if C#6 language features would work in .NET Framework versions other than 4.6. I was pretty confident that the features were almost all1 just syntactical seasoning, I thought I would find out.

The TL;DR is yes, C#6 features will work when compiled against .NET 2.0 and above, with a few caveats.

Async/await requires additional classes to be defined since the Task Parallel Library, IAwaitable and other types were not part of .NET 2.0.

The magic parts of string interpolation need some types to be defined (thanks to Thomas Levesque for catching this oversight).

Extension methods need the declaration of System.Runtime.CompilerServices.ExtensionAttribute so that the compiler can mark static methods as extension methods.

Rather than just try .NET 4.5, I decided to go all the way back to .NET 2.0 and see if I could write and execute a console application that used all the following C#6 features:

The code I used is not really important, though I have included it at the end of this post if you want to see what I did. The only mild stumbling block was the lack of obvious extension method support in .NET 2.0. However, extension methods are a language-only feature; all that is needed to make it work is an attribute that the compiler can use to mark methods as extension methods. Since .NET 2.0 doesn't have this attribute, I added it myself.

Exclusions

You might have noticed that I did not verify a couple of things. First, I left out the use of await in try/catch blocks. This is because .NET 2.0 does not include the BCL classes that the compiler expects when generating the state machines that drive async code. You might be able to find a third-party implementation that would add support, but my brief3 search was fruitless. That said, this feature will definitely work in .NET 4.5 as it is an update to how the compiler builds the code.

Second, I did not intentionally test the improved overload resolution. The improvements mostly seem to relate to resolution involving overloads that take method groups and nullable types. Unfortunately, in .NET 2.0 there was were no Func delegate types nor nullable value types (UPDATE: Nullable types totally existed in .NET 2.0 and C#2; thanks to Thomas Levesque for pointing out my strange oversight here – I blame the water), making it difficult to craft an example that would demonstrate this improvement. However, overload resolution affects how the compiler selects which method to use for a particular call site. Once the compiler has made the selection, it is fixed within the compiled output and as such, the version of the .NET framework has no bearing on whether the resolution is correct4.

Did it work?

With the test code written, I compiled and ran it. A console window flickered and Visual Studio returned. The code had run but I had forgotten to put anything in there that would give me chance to read the output. So, I dropped a breakpoint in at the end, and then ran it under the debugger. As I had suspected it might, everything worked.

Testing under .NET 2.0 runtime on Windows XP

Then I realised I was still executing it on a machine that had .NET 4.6 and therefore the .NET 4 runtime; would it still work under the .NET 2 runtime? So, I cracked open5 a Windows XP virtual machine from modern.ie and ran it again. It didn't work, because Windows XP did not come with .NET 2.0 installed (it wasn't even included in any of the service packs), so I installed it and tried once more. As I had suspected it might, everything worked.

In conclusion

If you find yourself still working with old versions of the .NET framework or the .NET runtime, you can still use and benefit from most features of C#6. I hope my small effort here is helpful. If you have anything to add, please comment.

I realise many of the C#6 features could be left untested for similar reasons since almost all are compiler changes that do not need framework support, but testing it rather than assuming it is kind of the point ↩

Waited an hour for the IE XP virtual machine to download and then get it running ↩

Demonstrable purposes only; if you take this into production, on your head be it ↩

This is a little easier to read while also reducing what has to be typed to achieve the desired result. The contents of the braces are evaluated as strings and inserted into the resultant string. Under the hood, this example compiles down to the same string.Format call that was made in the earlier example. The same composite formatting power is there to specify things like significant figures and leading zeroes. If you need a culture-invariant string, there is a handy static method in the new System.FormattableString class called Invariant(). If you wrap your string with this Invariant() method, you will get the string formatted against the invariant culture.

Magic

Of course, to end the story there without discussing the compiler magic would do a disservice to this new feature. In the example above, the result of the interpolation was stored in a variable with type var. This means the type is inferred by the compiler, which infers string and then performs appropriate compiler operations to turn our interpolated string into a call to string.Format(). This means that we don't have to do anything else to use this feature and get formatted strings. However, we can make the compiler do something different by rewriting the line like this2:

We have now specified that we are using a variable of type FormattableString. With this declaration, the compiler changes its behavior and we get a FormattedString object that represents the interpolated string. From this object, we can get the Format string that could be passed to a call that takes a format string, such as string.Format() (there are several others in types like Console, StringBuilder, and TextWriter). We can also retrieve the number of arguments3 in the string using ArgumentCount, and use GetArgument() and GetArguments() to retrieve the values of those arguments. Using a combination of Format and GetArguments(), we can pass this information to a different call that might reuse or extend it to produce a different message. Finally, we can use the ToString() call to specify an IFormatProvider, allowing us to format the string according to a specific culture.

By telling the compiler that we want a FormattableString we get all this extra information to use as we see fit. If you look at the arguments using either of the Get.. methods, you will see that the values have already been evaluated, so you can be assured that they won't change as you process the string. I'm sure there are situations where you might find this additional access to the formatting invaluable, such as when creating compound error messages, or perhaps doing some automatic language translation.

In conclusion…

There's not much else for me to say about C#6's string interpolation except to highlight one gotcha that I have hit a couple of times. The next two examples should illustrate appropriately:

It's hard to argue with either of them, after all, they both wrote an interpretation of DateTime.Now to the console, but the first one is perhaps a more useful output4.

So why did the second example not work? You may have already spotted the answer to that question, especially if you're a VB programmer; it's the $ at the start of the first example's string. This $ tells the compiler that we are providing a string for interpolation. It's an easy thing to miss and if you forget it (or perhaps, in rare cases, add it erroneously) you'll likely only spot the mistake through thorough testing5 or customer diligence6. As always, learn the failure points and work to mitigate them with code reviews and tests. I suspect the easiest mitigation may be to always use the interpolation style strings unless a situation demands otherwise.

And that's it for this week. What do you think of the new string interpolation support? Will you start using it? If not, why not? Do you have any cool ideas for leveraging the additional information provided by FormattableString? Please share in the comments.

If you're interested in my other posts on some of the new things introduced by C#6, here are links to posts I have written thus far:

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